Happy Mother’s Day

There is a kind of love in this world that asks for almost nothing in return. It does not arrive with contracts or conditions. It does not keep ledgers in the dark of night, tallying sacrifices against rewards. It is the love of a mother who measures her wealth not by what she owns, but by whether her children are laughing somewhere beneath the same sky.

The world has always survived on the backs of such women.

Not the women history books always remember, though there are those too. Not only the queens who led nations or the goddesses carved into temple walls with their many patient arms. But the ordinary mothers whose miracles happen quietly in kitchens, in sickrooms, in car rides to school, in sleepless nights spent listening for the sound of a feverish child breathing down the hall.

A mother learns early that love is not ownership. It is stewardship. A kind of holy tending.

She holds a child first in her body and then, for the rest of her life, in her heart. Even when they are grown. Even when they tower above her in height and opinion. Some invisible thread remains tied from soul to soul, stretching but never breaking.

There is an old spiritual understanding that souls choose one another before entering this life. That somewhere beyond memory and beyond language, agreements are made in the great silence of existence. We will find each other again, the souls say. We will help each other grow. We will walk each other home.

And what comfort there is in believing that.

To think that our children chose us, not for perfection, but for the lessons of love. For the laughter we would share. For the shelter we would become during the storms of their becoming. For the way we would stand beside them when the world sharpened its edges.

I think of my boys and know this with every fiber of my being: they are the joys of my life. Not because they owe me anything. Not because they complete me in the sentimental way greeting cards like to promise. But because through them, I have witnessed the astonishing privilege of loving beyond myself.

Children do not simply enlarge a life. They deepen it.

They teach us how fragile the heart truly is. How impossible it becomes to watch suffering without wanting to gather the whole world into your arms. A mother’s compassion expands because it must. It stretches itself wide enough to hold scraped knees and broken dreams, first loves and disappointments, triumphs and failures. And somewhere along the way, that compassion spills outward onto strangers too.

This is why mothers are among the great healers of the world.

Long before governments or philosophies, it was mothers who taught humanity mercy. Mothers who fed the hungry first. Mothers who wrapped the cold in blankets. Mothers who stood between danger and innocence with nothing but fierce love in their hands.

The great mothers of history carried this same sacred force. Mother Teresa tending to the forgotten with tenderness that embarrassed the powerful. Harriet Tubman leading souls to freedom as if every frightened traveler were her own child. Yashoda loving a divine child without needing to possess his destiny. Demeter grieving so deeply for her daughter that the earth itself responded.

Across every culture and every century, the mother archetype remains the same: she gives life not only through birth, but through presence.

And yet mothers rarely ask for monuments.

Most ask only this: Let my children be well. Let them find joy. Let them become who they came here to be.

There is something profoundly spiritual in that kind of selflessness. Not self-erasure, but surrender to a love larger than ego. A mother watches her children slowly become themselves, even when that becoming carries them farther from her arms. She learns to loosen her grip while never withdrawing her blessing.

Like trees beside rivers, mothers spend years strengthening roots for a future they may never fully see.

And perhaps this is why Mother’s Day carries such tenderness for so many of us. Because beneath the flowers and brunch reservations lives a deeper recognition: we are here because someone loved us enough to carry us through helplessness into strength.

Whether by birth, adoption, friendship, mentorship, or spirit, mothers are the guardians of human becoming.

So today we honor the women who stayed awake through the night worrying. The women who worked quietly without applause. The women who mothered children they did not give birth to. The women who lost children and still somehow found the courage to keep loving the world. The grandmothers, stepmothers, foster mothers, spiritual mothers, animal mothers, earth mothers.

And we honor the sacred mystery that allows souls to find one another in this brief and beautiful life.

To my boys, who chose me before either of us remembered how: thank you. You have been my teachers as much as my children. Every joy in your lives has become a lantern in mine. Watching you grow has been the great privilege of my existence.

If love is the closest thing we have to the divine, then motherhood may be one of its purest expressions.

Not because mothers are perfect.

But because they continue loving anyway.

Hari Om Tat Sat